Mozilla Axes its Privacy-Friendly Location Service - OMG! Ubuntu
www.omgubuntu.co.uk
Mozilla has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation
  • Snarwin@kbin.social
    3·
    6 months ago

    Patent infringement claims in 2019 saw Mozilla reach a settlement to avoid litigation. As part of that settlement it was forced to make changes to MLS that impacted its ability to invest in (commercially exploit?) and improve the service.

    Yet another nice thing ruined by IP trolls. It’s long past time we threw software patents into the dustbin of history where they belong.

  • The Baldness@beehaw.org
    2·
    6 months ago

    This sucks big time. Many users of custom mobile phone ROMs are concerned with privacy, and use Mozilla Location Services as an alternative to Google. Not sure what other options are available right now.

    Edit: The more I’m reading about this, the more absolutely fucked up it is. There really are no viable alternatives. Mozilla is going to just take all its collected data offline, and that’s that. Given that they accept monetary donations from the public, they should make the information public for download even if they don’t want to host the service anymore. Unbelievable.